When word got to us that the famous Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena would be opening their doors for just one weekend to the public, you know that the Rocket Man and his sister and I were going to be among the first in line!
Who could miss a chance to enter the actual Mission Control room, nicknamed "The Darkroom" at their Space Flight operations facility, the beating heart of their purpose - the Robotic Exploration of Outer Space!
We got up and out of the house at the crack of dawn, and good thing too because the lines that stretched from the JPL's front door almost felt like they could circle the moon.
Diego's expression says it best: how do you spell A-W-E-S-O-M-E? Standing six feet away from a detailed model of the Mars rover is just about as good as it gets; the only problem was explaining to him why we couldn't all climb on board and make our own journey to the Red Planet on the spot.
...our trip into the Clean Room, where we got the last California glimpse at the NEW Martian Rover, named Curiosity, who is moving soon to the launch pad and taking off for the Red Planet this Fall and will get there sometime in the summer of 2012.
Curiosity is over 2000 lbs, making it something like 60 times larger than the original Rover that went up in 2004. Given its mission - to see if the ICE that has been found on Mars might have ever contained LIFE, I guess they needed this Big Boy for the complex tasks it will handle from 60+ million km away.